Visual Storytelling & Sense Making

“Death by Pow­er­Point” is still the norm within cor­po­rate envi­ron­ments, espe­cially for inter­nal audi­ences. Sad, but true.

Com­bine poorly designed pre­sen­ta­tions with the ADD that’s so com­mon among cor­po­rate employ­ees, and you have a recipe for mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion and pro­duc­tiv­ity loss. No won­der peo­ple would rather check email or look at their Black­berry than focus on your presentation!

It’s bad enough when your pre­sen­ta­tions bore or con­fuse co-workers, but poorly designed pre­sen­ta­tions can have seri­ous con­se­quences with part­ner, cus­tomer or share­holder audiences.

These days, there’s no excuse for bad pre­sen­ta­tions when stakes are high. There are many resources read­ily avail­able for pre­sen­ters who aspire to make an impact or drive change as a result of their pre­sen­ta­tions. Do you want to make a dif­fer­ence in 2010?

For­tu­nately, visual lit­er­acy is a skill you can learn and prac­tice, even if you don’t think of your­self as artis­tic or visu­ally gifted. Bet­ter yet, the skills involved in clar­i­fy­ing your mes­sage will help you up your game when it comes to prob­lem solv­ing and mak­ing your case.

The Secrets of Great Presentations

Here are some of the most influ­en­tial writ­ers, edu­ca­tors and prac­ti­tion­ers who offer visual com­mu­ni­ca­tions help via books, blogs, webi­nars, speak­ing engage­ments, work­shops and/or on-site classes. They share their secrets via the fol­low­ing books and blogs, which I rec­om­mend as a great source of core prin­ci­ples and techniques:

Online Resources	Books
Nancy Duarte’s blog, with links to webi­nars, YouTube videos, etc.	Slide:ology, The Art and Sci­ence of Cre­at­ing Great Pre­sen­ta­tions by Nancy Duarte — the most com­pre­hen­sive resource available
Garr Reynold’s blog, full of “pre­sen­ta­tion zen” prin­ci­ples and links to other books and resources, includ­ing this syn­op­sis of his key concepts	Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen Design, by Garr Reynolds, offers spe­cific guid­ance on design prin­ci­ples to enhance pre­sen­ta­tions — a great com­pan­ion to Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen
Dan Roam’s blog, with lots of resources on visual thinking	The Back of the Nap­kin: Solv­ing Prob­lems and Sell­ing Ideas with Pic­tures, by Dan Roam — offers a won­der­ful frame­work for prob­lem solv­ing, visual think­ing and communications
	Unstuck: A Tool for Your­self, Your Team, and Your World, by Keith Yamashita and San­dra Spataro — a prac­ti­cal guide for diag­nos­ing your sit­u­a­tion and find­ing cre­ative solu­tions, espe­cially in team-based settings
	Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Sur­vive and Oth­ers Die, by Chip Heath & Dan Heath

My cur­rent favorites are Slide:ology and Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen Design. But, much as I love the design sen­si­bil­ity and prin­ci­ples of the Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen books, the brain­storm­ing and prob­lem solv­ing guid­ance in Slide:ology makes it a more com­pre­hen­sive resource — what I’d buy if I could afford just one resource on pre­sen­ta­tion design.

Think­ing Holis­ti­cally about Presentations

Slide:ology is com­pre­hen­sive because author Nancy Duarte approaches pre­sen­ta­tion devel­op­ment from a big pic­ture per­spec­tive, as she illus­trates here:

Her book dis­cusses all 3 core com­po­nents of suc­cess­ful pre­sen­ta­tions, with an empha­sis on the con­cepts, prin­ci­ples and tech­niques involved in both mes­sage devel­op­ment and visual sto­ry­telling. Her case stud­ies and illus­tra­tions include tech­niques that her firm uses when devel­op­ing pre­sen­ta­tions for high-profile clients like Al Gore. (Her firm was the visual pow­er­house behind Al Gore’s award-winning An Incon­ve­nient Truth.)

Both Duarte and Roam’s books pro­vide very help­ful frame­works for con­cept devel­op­ment and visual think­ing, espe­cially for dia­grams and arrange­ments used to depict ideas and rela­tion­ships among data.

Both experts are strong advo­cates of start­ing the brain­storm­ing and prob­lem solv­ing process away from the com­puter screen, using nap­kins or Post-It notes as a tech­nique to focus on the essen­tial ideas to be communicated.

As a New Year’s res­o­lu­tion for 2010, why not com­mit to invest­ing time and energy to learn how to be a more effec­tive pre­sen­ter? It’s well within your reach.

Tagged as: presentation design, presentation resources, problem solving, storytelling, visual communications

Revised on October 14, 2010